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Authors’ sources of information: a new dimension in information scattering

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Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine the usage patterns of core journals by scholars, and to address the differences among various academic disciplines. Thus, the references of 11,230 corresponding authors for the past 35 years from the world’s top five highly cited universities and institutions were analyzed. To build robust models of information scattering, we need a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. The results show that core journals usage is a social phenomenon, in exactly the same way as Bradford’s law, Zipf’s law and Lotka’s law. The analysis of author references shows that if core scientific journals are arranged in order of decreasing productivity, then they could be divided into a small group of highly cited periodicals and a large group of minimally cited ones. Scholars may do browsing and similar information-seeking activities to form their core journals, and the findings may support Bates’s hypothesis that Bradford’s core zone is best searched by browsing. Bradford’s law and relevant research may consequently help to solve many of the practical problems that practitioners of the profession face, particularly in collection development in libraries, and help users to gather highly scattered information.

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Notes

  1. In this study, citing/citation is used as a proxy for usage. Authors use the articles they cite, but they use much more than they choose to cite.

  2. In this study, references denote the items offered in the reference section of author’s documents.

  3. In this study, the word document refers to the ISI Thomson bibliographic record information, which comprises a paper’s items such as authors, title, affiliations, abstracts, keywords, references. These items were extracted from the original paper’s full-text. The type of each ISI Thomson document could be article, meeting abstract, proceedings paper, review, editorial material, book review, letter, note, etc.

  4. The ESI is an ISI Thomson product that determines the influential individuals, institutions, papers, publications, and countries in their field of study. In the case of institutions, the ESI aggregate publications and citations at the institutional level and measures the institutional output and prestige attributable to the affiliated researchers.

  5. http://www.sciencewatch.com/about/met/journallist/.

  6. In this study, author’s citing journals refers to journals, which have been cited in reference section of author’s documents.

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Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Library and Information Science, Shahid Chamran University, Ahvaz, Iran

    Zahed Bigdeli

  2. Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC), Shiraz, Iran

    Ali Gazni

  3. Shahid Chamran University, Ahvaz, Iran

    Ali Gazni

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  1. Zahed Bigdeli
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  2. Ali Gazni
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Correspondence to Ali Gazni.

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Bigdeli, Z., Gazni, A. Authors’ sources of information: a new dimension in information scattering. Scientometrics 92, 505–521 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0609-1

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